‘Tis the season of hagiography, it seems, and after Fortune’s euphoric dissertation on the people that run IBM comes the New York Times performing a similarly genuflectory exercise on IDG Communications Inc founder and chief Pat McGovern, only the Times being the Times, the odd piece of humour sneaks in – the paper recalls that IDG has had six failures among 120 publications, but allows McGovern to excuse one of them by saying we started a magazine in Iran in 1978, but only managed to produce two issues before the revolution, and while describing Mr McGovern as having the charm and enthusiasm of a paper boy, punctures the pomposity by throwing in the name of the paper that he once delivered – the Philadelphia Bulletin in the 1940s.
